


Call me Back from the Sea

by pensiveFabulist



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Family, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 06:19:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensiveFabulist/pseuds/pensiveFabulist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All these years later, she cannot remember her first impression of Dirk. But she can remember Dave’s.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call me Back from the Sea

           

                All these years later, she cannot remember her first impression of Dirk. But she can remember Dave’s.

                It begins with the voice. They both listen for the same thing, that easy southern drawl that paves the knotted roads of her brother’s drawn out metaphors and terrible lyrics. She is unsurprised to hear so much of Dave in Dirk; what catches her off guard is the well-hidden conciseness with which he pieces together his sentences, the deliberation that is so plain to her because it is _hers_. But it was Dirk’s first.

                At first she makes a game out of tormenting Dave, dancing circles around his turbid waters and watches as he struggles to reconcile the label of brother with father. It is when she sees his eyes, wildly unstable and filled to bursting with the remains of pedestals that she finally stops. She will not be the one to break him. He will do that himself, if she will only step aside.

                He thinks that no one sees the way he looks at Dirk, she knows it. And she wonders if what they see is the same: a long sharp nose and carved features (once pale, she thinks, but the sun has seen to that). And those eyes, at once so cold and so hungry that she finds herself embarrassingly thankful for those ridiculous sunglasses. She thinks that maybe Dave is seeing, _really_ seeing, for the first time, the man he tried for so long to make himself into. Time goes by, and they find themselves nearing the end of the new session, and still she watches as every deliberate movement, lilting speech and torturous reminder takes down a piece of the pedestal, only to put another up again in its place. Whenever Dirk approaches, she casts her eye out with the Light to see Dave shrink back and will crimson transparent. When she speaks to Dirk, it is in thoughtless fractions so that she can watch her brother, watch, watch and see through his eyes what she is missing.

                She knows it must be strange for anyone to stumble into a parent out of the closet, but it is stranger still to see it played out before her, to see the look in her father’s eyes whenever Jake drops in. Dave refuses to discuss it, but the façade is shallow, even for him. She’s seen his brother’s websites; Dave must have known, how could he not? (Because it’s one thing to hit on your best friend ironically and quite another entirely to want to jump his bones.) It’s watching Dirk and Jake spar that she finally realizes how much he must have loved Dave, how badly he must have wanted to see him survive the game. There is something manic in his eyes and in the way he swings at Jade’s grandfather, something that is down on its knees and praying that every strike is blocked, that every blow is returned, and that when it _counts_ , this will be what makes the difference.

(She wishes he could remember that it already has.)

                When the time comes for them to face the demon, they stand on the top of their respective echeladders; ready and hungry and eager to put an end to it, to the game. To everything. And they have never seen, never fought, never dreamt anything like him (though dreaming is dead now), and there will be times when she sees with the Light and it takes everything Dave has to slow him down enough for her to find that pinprick of a star that is their way forwards. But the pinprick is growing and growing into a sun, and now,

                finally-

The game is theirs.

                And Jake and Jane and Dirk and Roxy get their reward properly, now: bodies made of stars and gems and porcelain, and the everlasting life that goes with them.

                She’s heard a little bit about heroes of Heart. Fractured, splintered players, with no knowledge of a single self amongst the many. She also knows a little bit about the god tiers, how after the game asks you to break yourself, it puts you back together, makes you whole again in ways you weren’t before. As a Seer, she has learned how to watch, to know when things restructure themselves around her.

                She has never quite seen something put back together the way Dirk is.

                It starts in his eyes, and she sees it: flashes, of all the lives he’s never lived, of all the people he can’t remember loving. For him, to be whole means to remember, and when he catches sight of Dave, seeing him as if for the first time, she watches as those amber irises bloom, filling with the searing heat and pain of memory.

                Silently, he walks towards Dave, and her brother’s back is turned, his mind elsewhere, when Dirk spins him around, and pulls him in to a crushing embrace.

                At first, Dave goes rigid, unused to sudden touch, but then she sees something in his face change, and he looks down at Dirk. What enters his voice is poorly disguised.

                “…Bro?”

                And Dirk, shuddering silently over the shoulder of his brother and son, nods.


End file.
